People will obey the rules you give them. But you don’t always give them the rules you mean to.

If you give someone a rule that states, “I always want to hear your opinion,” but then every time they voice it you shut them down and berate them, really you’ve given them the rule “I want you to lie to me and tell me that your opinion matches mine.” And they’ll obey that rule.

In other words, the rules are set by what you do, not what you say. And if you give too many contradictory rules, remember that people will always obey the rule: “If you can’t win, don’t play.”

My oldest daughter is 13 today.

I have now been a father for thirteen years. They have been the best thirteen years of my life.

The highest compliment a parent can pay to their oldest child is younger siblings. Based on the model of all of my kids (not just the oldest), I’d have had ten more had other circumstances not limited me to three. But these three have been the finest blessings I could have ever asked for. I did not deserve her when my oldest first arrived, and I still don’t – but every day my motivation is to keep up.

My Bean became a Beansprout, and then my Beansprout became a Beanstalk. She’s as incredible a person as I’ve ever known, and I’m honored that I get to keep on knowing her. This is the stage of parenting where you aim to provide a safety net and otherwise get out of the way – she has plenty of adventures to go on. Some will be with me, of course – and I’m glad she wants to. But there’s a whole wide world out there that she’s already claiming as her own, and she will grow far faster and taller than my garden can ever hold.

I love you, my Beanstalk. I’m proud of you, and grateful for you, and I will love you every day forever. Keep growing.

Happy New Month!

This month, I am committing to more acceptance. I am a perennial “boat-rocker,” and I often shift uncomfortably when things could be better. But the juice isn’t always worth the squeeze, and accepting more things as they are gives me more energy to put toward the things that matter. I will spend more time looking around and making sure that’s what I’m doing.

May your waters be calm, my friends.

Let’s say you’re planning to work on your roof next Spring. You call a supply company for roofing tiles and tell them you need some. They ask you when, and you demand to have them nine months before you plan to begin working.

Then, the day before you start, you inspect the tiles and find some things you don’t like about them. You call the company, asking them to fix the error and send you more tiles by tomorrow, because that’s when you’re starting, and you ordered these tiles nine months in advance just to avoid this problem.

Do you see the problem here?

You can ask for things whenever you want, assuming you and the other person can make an agreement. But time is precious, and when you’re asking for it from other people, use it well.

Let’s say you have a budget of $300 for the month. That has to cover all your needs – your food, gas, etc. You’re budgeting very tightly; there are no dollars to spare. Then you discover a local vendor is selling five-dollar bills for $4 each. Given your tight budget, how many should you buy?

The answer is all of them! Obviously! Buy 75 immediately, and then use all that money to buy even more, and repeat until the vendor either stops selling them to you or raises the price above five dollars.

It’s insane that I would even have to say that, but there are plenty of people who don’t seem to grasp the concept. Some expenditures of money (or time, or juice of any kind) give you more back than you spent. There are almost always diminishing marginal returns, but until you hit that point, you should absolutely buy those things.

If you’re a fisherman and you catch fish by hand to sell them, then buying a net is obviously a smart call. Buying ten almost certainly isn’t, because you probably can’t use ten. That’s the diminishing marginal return. But if you don’t buy even one because you “can’t afford it,” then you’re a really terrible business planner.

It’s like saying you don’t have time to assemble your bicycle, because you have to start walking across the country and it’s going to take you weeks if not months. The amount of time you spend assembling the bike will clearly pay itself back many times over!

Don’t be one of those people. If there’s a five-dollar bill for sale for four dollars, buy as many as you can.

You wouldn’t put a blacksmith in charge of an army, even though he knows a lot about weapons. You wouldn’t put an accountant in charge of a sales team, even though she knows a lot about revenue. You wouldn’t put a baker in charge of a restaurant supply chain, even though they know a lot about food.

Subject matter expertise isn’t the same as scope, philosophy, and people management. It’s great to have both, but in a pinch, skip the subject matter expertise. Smart people can learn and rely on experts, but it can be nearly impossible to make a general out of a blacksmith.

If you think someone is going to give you an order, but they haven’t yet – what do you do?

Some people instinctively bristle. They start putting up the walls before the order even comes down. Other people start obeying the order they think will come before it even happens.

I’m much more naturally in the former camp, though I don’t actually think there’s a correct way to be all the time. Context matters – what the order is, who’s giving it and why are all important considerations.

But I do think there’s an important point to think about. If you think the order you’re expecting is a good idea, why haven’t you already done it? Why wait until you think you’re going to be ordered to? Your reasons for obedience matter. Make sure they’re valid.

I can tell an effective leader from an ineffective one from one interaction. One single behavior will predict whether the person I’m observing will be an amplifier of talent or hinder it.

When confronted with unsatisfactory behavior, do they jockey for status or do they get to a solution?

It’s simple when you boil it down – you can let the other person “know who’s boss,” or you can get the actual behavior and results you want, consistently and in the long term. You can’t do both.

If an employee delivers work that doesn’t meet specifications, you can let your ego drive. You can make sure they know how disappointed you are, how bad their work was, and how it could jeopardize their job. You can disrespect them professionally in this way, and it will certainly establish who has the higher status in that moment. Of course, it won’t do a thing to improve the actual work in the long term, and in fact even in the short term, the best-case scenario is just someone who takes less initiative. More likely, that employee now has one foot out the door.

The true leader skips all that. They immediately identify the gaps between the delivered work and the desired work and look for ways to close them. They coach, guide, and support. They don’t care if the employee “feels bad” about their prior work – why would they want that? What they *want* is a happy employee who delivers good work consistently. And they know that the way to get that isn’t to dress them down and disrespect them.

That one mentality underpins everything else about leadership. If an employee’s failure to meet a goal threatens your ego to the point that your first instinct is to defend your status, you shouldn’t be in charge of anyone.

Celebrate all milestones. Don’t let them get old. Gather your friends and family unto you and make up any reason at all to be joyous. The joy runs out quickly enough; there’s no reason to let it go quietly.

It is difficult to get accurate, helpful feedback as a leader. In almost all work, your work serves someone else; that’s the nature of our society. It’s a good thing – we help each other, and we work hard to get better at serving each other.

But if you’re a people leader, then the people you serve – the very people that your efforts are supposed to help – also have a lot of reasons to lie to you.

Without a positive, constant feedback loop it’s nearly impossible to improve at anything. And people leaders very rarely have such a feedback loop. Which explains why “bad management” is so endemic.

If you want to wield authority effectively, you have to recognize it for what it is. In the context of professional work, it’s a service job. Your role is to be a coordinator, a force multiplier, a coach, and a supporter. It’s not to be a monarch. If you try to be the latter, you’ll never be the rest – and no one will ever tell you.

They’ll just quit.